KEYNOTE. The Evolution of the Testing Roles - Carlos Arguelles at InnovateQA Seattle 2025

THE EVOLUTION OF THE TESTING ROLES

The Test roles (such as SDET and QAE) have had to evolve significantly in the last 3 decades.

Back in the 1990s, companies like Microsoft had a 1:1 dev:test ratio. This created poor dynamics where developers did minimal testing and testers were seen as second-class.

The ratio changed to 10:1 in the 2000s, given the rise of web services and real-time monitoring. This shift meant developers tested more and created better partnerships with testers.

The ratio shifted even further, to 100:1, in the 2010s as companies reduced dedicated testing roles (and some even eliminated the role).
We're now facing yet one more paradigm shift that will force us to re-think these roles again.

Key Takeaways:

Test roles have evolved significantly throughout time. You need to embrace change and evolve with the needs.

Carlos Arguelles

Carlos Arguelles is a Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon. He has 27 years of experience working in various aspects of Developer Productivity Engineering at Amazon, Google and Microsoft. He was a Technical Lead for company-wide Infrastructure for Integration Testing at Amazon for 6 years and held the same position at Google for 4 years.
Carlos is passionate about Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery and Core Developer Infrastructure for mid-to-large software companies. Spending nearly three decades at three of the largest software companies in the world, he has seen first-hand how hundreds of thousands of developers write code, review code, test code and deploy code at large scale. At these large companies, little inefficiencies can aggregate to developer fatigue and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars of productivity lost or wasted hardware resources. Carlos obsesses about how to make engineers' lives better, remove toil, improve efficiency, and raise the bar in engineering and operational excellence.

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